Plagued Beast

Whenever demons or undead take over a country, or some horrible magical event happens in a region, there’s always the question of what life in a realm of death is actually like. Like, what happens to the animals? Do they flee? Do they remain, skittish and agitated? Do ghouls eat them all or do they find a way to persist? Or are they, too, morphed?

The plagued beast is the result of demon plague—in Golarion, yet another stain from the Worldwound. But in your game it can work for any necromantic or fiendish affliction, and is useful for giving your undead something to ride that’s sturdier than a skeletal steed.

The centaurs of the Iron Lands are in dire straights. Demon plague is racing through their herds, decimating the stock just before the yearly horse fair the centaurs depend on for buying winter stores. If they can’t cull the undead beasts and save their horses, they will have to rely in the Medichar Bank for a loan—an ill prospect, as Medichar law protects only humanoids from slavery if they default. Adventurers are needed to hunt down the plagued steeds (possibly hindered by Medichar Bank agents) and discover the root of the infection.

Loch Annis is famous for three things: a series of three sentry keeps, the hag (long slain) that gave the loch its name, and a serpentine beast, likely an elasmosaurus, that draws tourists and naturalists. But when some necromantic storm engulfs one of the keeps, the lake monster “Annie” becomes a plagued horror, terrorizing towns up and down the loch.

A traveling circus’s showstopper is covering one lucky farmer’s animal in gold. Crowds for miles around come to watch the Eeling & Sons Circus lead a horse, mule, or kite deer through a magic mirror, which it comes through dusted in real gold leaf the farmer can then curry out of the animal’s hide. But three months into the act, an alarming pattern is emerging: Every animal that has gone through the mirror comes down with demon plague. After a plagued deer terrorizes a halfling village, the sheriff wants the circus stopped—permanently.

—The Worldwound 56 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 194

Long time no see, huh? Happy holidays, everybody.

Looking for the piranha swarm? We’ll cover it when we cover the dunkleosteus.

Pharaonic Guardian

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a love/hate relationship with fantasy Egypt tropes.  Mummies are interesting undead, period, and when done thoughtfully, Egypt-inspired adventures can be some of the best around (see the excellent Mummy’s Mask Adventure Path).  On the other hand, it can be way too easy to just drop fantasy-Egypt wholesale into your Pathfinder/D&D campaign without a lot of forethought (even Forgotten Realms was guilty of this), leading to trite adventures involving pyramids, death traps, and the obligatory cameo appearance by Anubis.

The pharaonic guardian, at first glance, looks both useful (it’s the kind of monster you’d totally see in a Mummy movie but that there hasn’t exactly been stats for yet ) and pretty generic (oh great, it’s still an undead tomb guardian, no matter what kind of head it has). 

But it shines in the details: A judging gaze and soul-rending wings are just cool.  The fact that it can use (and even briefly hand over) a +3 ghost touch speed longsword and shield is a nice cinematic touch.  Even the alignment is flavorful—not a bland N or LN, but not your typical undead NE or CE either.  And why lawful evil?  Because pharaonic guardians “are the product of fear and sweat wrung from slaves and other servants”—in fact, they’re made from an amalgam of these servants’ souls! 

So these are creatures born of atrocity.  And they probably will try to kill you.  But if on the rare chance you’re actually trying to preserve a pyramid rather than loot it…maybe you’ll get lucky.

But say you’re not down with Horus and Set.  It’s interesting to think of other reasons a culture might have animal-headed tomb guardians…

In the early stages of exploring a crypt, adventurers have an opportunity to step into magical mural of a garden, where they may ritually purify themselves and converse with the denizens therein.  One of these figments, a foul-tempered, warthog-headed armorer, will ask them to swear an oath not to disturb a certain burial chamber.  Should they do so (and keep their promise), he will come to their aid later in the depths, arriving bearing ghost touch-infused arms when the adventurers are set upon by the tomb’s more malevolent spirits.

Elves of Parnish have a taboo against being represented in images after their death.  Instead, they are depicted in carvings, paintings and tapestries bearing the heads of their totem animals.  To the Parnish’eya, it is an honor to have one’s soul be destined after death to become a tomb guardian.  But the elves’ strict religious and funeral obligations weigh upon the souls over the centuries, and most of these guardians grow cold and evil during the course of their endless watch.

A wise ruler puts some distance between his palace and his line's necropolis.  The Captive King is a lesson why.  When Tarpin XII decided to shore up his faltering reign by building a palace atop the burial city of Omun-Ke, it did not occur to him the pharaonic guardians would see fit to judge the weak king according to the harsh standards of namesake.  Now Tarpin XII is naught but ash in an urn, and his son Tarpin XIII has spent 30 years a prisoner in his own palace.  Praying for a rescue that never comes, he appears in public only to pronounce draconian edicts dictated by his undead jailers, who are intent in restoring the faith and territory of the first Tarpin's empire.

—Osirion, Legacy of the Pharaohs 60 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 191

I also like Mummy’s Mask because it’s one of the last APs I successfully read all of as it came out, rather than in desperate cram sessions after the fact.  My life got weird, y’all.

It’s been long enough now that I bet many of you have forgotten the truly messed-up elves of Eberron.  No matter what system you play, you owe it to yourself to pick up either the 3.5 Eberron Camapaign Setting, Player’s Guide to Eberron, or Races of Eberron.  At time of writing, used PGTEs are a steal at $16.50, and for value for money it’s still really hard to beat a used ECS at roughly $36.

Also, old-school (or at least, middle-school) D&D fans will remember the Dark Sun novels, specifically the Prism Pentad by Troy Denning.  The first three books were flat-out baller, but the fourth, The Obsidian Oracle, was a muddy, claustrophobic, and depressing read, even by Dark Sun standards.  But it featured some truly horrific bad guys—beast-headed giants that got those heads through magical manipulation that (if I’m recalling correctly—I haven’t re-read these books since, like, ’94) also doomed their children’s souls.  So there’s another source of animal-headed atrocities for you.

Nemhain

Named after an Irish war goddess, the nemhain (pronounced “NAY-wuhn,” because Irish spelling is the world’s greatest exercise in trolling) is an undead creature who is interesting on a number of levels:

1) The nemhain chose to become undead—Bestiary 5 says “as a means of protecting a person, object, place, or ideal.”  That’s automatically interesting to me—committing yourself (and your loved ones; see below) to eternal unlife to protect something is devotion/fanaticism on a grand scale.  You don't do that just to guard treasure in a 10’x10’ room…but you might for a holy (or unholy) relic, a political movement, a beloved hero, etc.  Every nemhain once made a choice, and that means every nemhain has a story…perhaps one that your PCs would be wise to ferret out.

2) The nemhain is surrounded by a cloud of bound spirits—usually the spirits of her relatives or friends.  I love this because it recalls one of my favorite undead of all time, the gray philosopher (from the Creature Catalogue and the Monstrous Compendium: Mystara Appendix), whose malevolent thoughts took shape as wispy spirits called malices.  I also love it for the pure horror of this scenario—B5 makes it clear that these souls were usually unaware that they would be drawn into the nemhain-to-be’s self-sacrifice.  It’s one thing to consign yourself to eternity; it’s quite another to bring the local PTA along with you.  And speaking of which…

3) Some nemhains start out good—but they all become evil.  No matter how pure a nemhain-to-be’s motives, the vileness of undeath and the violation inherent in harvesting the souls of her loved ones seals her fate.  So the nemhain is at best a tragic figure whose single-mindedness damned both herself and those around her.  At worst, she’s an abomination willing to sacrifice anything—and anyone—to her cause.

All in all then, every nemhain is special, every nemhain has an interesting story, and every nemhain is deadly (CR 15) at the gaming table.

The pride of elves is dangerous indeed.  When a wild elf soothsayer foretold that the Rose Chamber would be claimed by the dead, the grey elf princess Dharotea swore it should never come to pass.  She promptly closed the borders to the human mage-scholars, the halfling river traders, and especially the dwarf nations and their necromancer-kings.  Even as her self-isolated nation suffered, Dharotea, now queen, never wavered—she would protect the capital, the palace, and its glittering Rose Chamber at any cost.  Finally, to stave off her own death, she performed the Act of Reaping to become a nemhain…inadvertently slaying the rest of the royal court and fulfilling the vision the soothsayer warned of so long ago.

No one expects a bardic college to be deadly—especially not one famous for its jugglers, tumblers, and acrobats.  But the nemhain known as the First Harlequin roams the Laernuin College grounds, and those he selects to perform in his monthly pantomimes must have the ancient forms memorized exactly or be struck down mid-performance.

The worst revolutionaries are the time-traveling ones.  After thwarting a dangerous anarchist—a fiendishly charismatic bard with enough alchemy under his belt to be a literal bomb thrower—adventures discover that he has hatched plots in both the future and the past to undo their hard work.  Worse yet, defeating the anarchist’s allies in one time period doesn’t always mean they’re off the game board.  While in their own time the anarchist’s chief lieutenant, Victoria Graves, is too elderly to do more than fund whisper campaigns against them, in the past she is a dashing vigilante, and in the future she is a nemhain determined to see the Scarlet Revolution come to pass.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 182

I’ve always wanted to learn Irish (I’m still in touch with my whatever-cousins-however-removed in Carndonagh) but I’m pretty sure I’m 20 years too late for my brain to expand as far as it needs to.  (Hell, I bought a bodhrán in Donegal when I was 17 and I still can't play it, and I’ve been drumming since fourth grade.)

If you’re looking for a fantastic fall-from-grace tale that echoes the nemhain’s, I highly recommend Garth Nix’s Clariel: The Lost Abhorsen, as well as the rest of The Old Kingdom series.

Mummy Lord

Say what you will about Brendan Fraser—Lord knows everyone else has—but the Mummy franchise completely reshuffled how we think of mummies on the power scale.  When I was a kid, they were the joke of the monster world: a fourth-stringer, a Halloween costume made out of toilet paper.  Now we expect our mummies to not just deliver the mummy rot, but also whip up a sandstorm, explode into a swarm of beetles, summon elementals out of stone, and generally wreak havoc.  Which is hella RPG fodder right there.

So when you want recreate that cinematic feel at the table, adding class levels to the base mummy isn’t good enough.  Nor is defaulting to the lich template—there’s just not enough flavor in the lich’s special ability list.  Besides, when your PCs finally kill the mummy, you want them grabbing all the treasure they can and running for the exit as the mummy’s pyramid falls apart around them, not setting up an archaeological dig to hunt for a phylactery for the next three play sessions.  Liches are symbols of eternity, but they can slow play down.  Mummies are also symbols of eternity, but once you crack open their tomb, they hit with the fury of a sudden sandstorm.

That’s why we have the mummy lord template.  He’s everything you want in a caster, able to command undead and spit superheated sand, and if you don’t kill him right he’ll return for the sequel.  Sounds like the perfect post-1999 mummy to me.

Assuming you weren’t reading this blog in 2013, here’s the original “Mummy” entry.  And since I’m pretty sure you know how to deploy the mummy lord in a desert setting, here are some seeds that try to get beyond the usual Pyramids & Pharaohs shtick.

Elves have spirits rather than souls—when they die, they return to the earth, only sometimes to be born again.  When a matriarch of a destroyed elven kingdom perishes while her fugitive nation is crossing the desert, rather than surrender her spirit to the unfriendly terrain, her indomitable will causes her to rise as a mummy lord.  The result is a part-elf, part-sand creature.  No longer tethered to the forests of her birth, she begins to build a new kingdom of terror right there in the desert.

A cardinal believed he could not die if his heart was removed.  In a sense, he was right, because the ritual he used turned him into a mummy lord.  Years later, adventurers investigating the illegal trade in saints’ preserved body parts comes across the canopic jar in which the cardinal’s liver is stored (it was stolen without the prelate’s knowledge and placed on the black market).  While they are tracking down the mysterious jar’s provenance, the cardinal (who now secretly rules a principality with an iron fist) assumes they are the original thieves and sets about having them killed.

Private school isn’t easy.  Especially a private school founded on the site of a mass grave.  Led by their debate teacher, who has quietly taught them thaumaturgy on the side, along with a helpful dose of fencing lessons from one of the phys. ed. staff, a ragtag group of students has managed to thwart an invasion of shambling corpses, escaped a book that tried to trap them in a demiplane, and driven off an immature color out of space.  Now corpses begin piling up, each one drained of blood.  The students suspect a vampire, but it is actually their dean, a mummy lord wrapped in layers of illusion, who is the culprit—courtesy of a blood-drinking kukri.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #84 84–85 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 176–177

Having medical-professional parents, my mummy costumes at least featured real bandages.  #whitecoatprivilege

BTW, I actually like Brendan Fraser a lot.  I think he needs to strangle his agent, though.  Also I love Universal Studios’ Revenge of the Mummy ride, even if mechanical and operator errors did force us to go through it three times in a row once.  (Or was it four?  It was a lot.)

Speaking of which, what are we feeling about the Tom Cruise Mummy reboot?  It looked like a standard B.B.N. (???) F. film to me, so I skipped it.  (Speaking of which, I’ve taking to calling these crappy 2000s franchise movies film bleu, in a nod to the great film noir genre, because among other similarities they are color-graded to filth.  And because they tend to blow.  Who’s with me?)

Hey, here’s last night's radio show.  We played melancholic songs about the end of summer and defiant songs with Charlottesville in mind, including the new benefit song from Wilco.  Stream/download now through Monday, 08/21/17, at midnight.  (PS: No show next week; we’re down for station maintenance.)

Leng Ghoul

(Illustration by Miguel Regodón Harkness comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

There’s no way I can do justice to Leng ghouls here.  For that, you of course need to turn to the work of H. P. Lovecraft, particularly The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.  For a quicker overview of Leng and how it fits into Pathfinder, Greg A. Vaughan’s “Leng: The Terror Beyond Dreams” has a gazetteer of that nightmare realm, courtesy of Pathfinder Adventure Path #65: Into the Nightmare Rift. 

Here, then, is the short-short version: Leng ghouls are more bestial in appearance than other ghouls, having vaguely canine faces.  They’re also substantially more powerful, weighing in at a mighty CR 10 and packing a nasty version of ghoul fever.  (Also of note: Gugs fear them.  Meanwhile, while normal ghasts are fairly close cousins of normal ghouls, Leng ghouls and the bestial Leng ghasts hate each other with a passion.)

But despite all this, what really sets these undead apart is their intellect: Leng ghouls are civilized, even erudite, with close to genius-level intelligence, all Knowledge skills treated as class skills, and the ability to cast pretty much any scroll.  These are ghouls that, when they’re not trying to devour you for dinner, might invite you to a scholarly lecture or chamber music performance.  You just have to watch out around mealtimes.  (And there’s that nasty habit they have of worshipping the Outer God Nyarlathotep…)

The key hook for GMing Leng ghouls is surprise.  There should always be a twist somewhere in the encounter.  Maybe it’s the Leng ghoul delightedly inviting them to peruse its library.  Maybe the Leng ghoul acts like their friend only to betray them at the last minute.  Maybe the PCs descend into a Leng ghoul’s wine cellar only to find themselves climbing a tower on the moon.  Maybe after too long in a Leng ghoul’s company, the PCs find themselves tainted by the touch of the Crawling Chaos, or invited to be guests of honor at a ball in Hell.  The point is, when PCs encounter a Leng ghoul the adventure should either take a sharp left turn into Weirdsville, or else kick into high gear with the pedal to the floor.  Encounters with Leng ghouls don’t have to be a melee; they might be beneficial, even friendly—but they should always lead somewhere unexpected.

Adventurers arrive at the Kingdom of Ghouls during strange times—a delegation from Leng has just arrived for the first tome.  Expecting to have to slaughter their way through waves of feral undead to reach their nemesis, the fabled Ghoul King, the party members are taken utterly aback to find themselves given tokens of protection and asked to arbitrate trade negotiations between the Kingdom of Ghouls and Leng.

Adventurers are fighting gugs underground when the arrival of a Leng ghoul terrifies the great shaggy beasts.  The ghoul invites the adventurers back to its chateau, an otherwise ordinary-looking villa built into a barren cavern.  The Leng ghoul is a charming host, and only when the adventurers try to leave (and discover the villa now sits on a cliff overlooking an oily sea against a black sky) do they discover the ghoul’s true motivation for befriending them—one that involves a moon-beast potentate, drow flagellants, and a stock market for body parts run by the mercane.

Adventurers have found a scroll they cannot translate, written in hieroglyphics that conform to no known language.  Soon they find themselves the subject of a number of assassination attempts.  A Leng ghoul wants the scroll, as it will allow him to bind a good outsider to the helm of a skyship designed to sail on human-skin wings between the stars.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 120

For another look at the Leng ghoul, check out Daily Planescape’s take.

Original post edited for my Blogger readers:

Last week’s radio show had new Charly Bliss, new Lorde, old Red Five, classic Magnapop, and more.  You can stream or download the show till midnight tonight (Monday, 03/13/17, U.S. Eastern), so grab it immediately and enjoy!

Leechroot

Leechroots look like plant monsters.  But actually, they're undead.  And instead of creeping along like most plant creatures, they tend to burrow.  In fact, they can even grapple creatures and then drag them underground, literally burying them alive.  And their slashing roots cause bleed damage that resists even magical healing.

Bestiary 5 notes that leechroots “emerge from the remains of plants poisoned by the blood-drenched soils of war-torn forests.”  This makes sense—battlefields tend to have coherent battle plans, clear rules of engagement, and hospital tents (however makeshift) nearby.  On the other hand, fighting in the forest is close-up, dirty, and deadly, full of ambushes, quiet knifings, and men dying in the underbrush because their fellows couldn’t find them in time—all providing rich necromantic compost for an undead root.

Though it doesn't provide mechanics for it, B5 also suggests leechroots can turn dead plants into their spawn—a good excuse to slap an undead template onto your favorite plant creature.  And while the exact mechanics are again not explicitly stated, leechroots in groups of four or more can form a sentient network known as a hivemind that serves primarily as a mutual-defense pact…and a promise of deadly, soil-covered retribution.

The secret vampire lords of Ornov quietly encourage the growth of leechroot on their lands, procuring cuttings from over the border in war-torn Haig.  A leechroot’s presence easily explains any poorly buried, exsanguinated corpses, and a posse of men-at-arms leading a militia to burn out a leechroot infestation is a very visible—and popular—symbol of the princes’ dedication to their peasants’ well-being.

Vanaras and humans are engaged in a deadly battle over territory and logging rights.  This long-running conflict has only festered with age—so much so that leechroots are now responsible for most of the casualties.

Wars of ideas can be as deadly as wars of arrows and blades.  Adventurers visit an overgrown agora where philosophers used to debate in public.  Here Galen abandoned the utilitarianism of his teachers, transforming his master’s model of the Cunning Mind to the brutal Culling Blade—his first step to becoming the genocidal monster known as the Hand in Bone.  As the adventurers move throughout the complex, haunts offer glimpses of Galen’s development and fall—or rather, willful leap—from grace.  Not only is surviving the haunts a challenge, but the agora is infested with leechroots, born from the hate engendered by Galen’s cruel, honeyed words.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 155

Pedro Coelho created the leechroot as an RPG Superstar entry.  Check it and the judges’ comments out here.

Kurobozu

(Illustration—credited to Kent Hamilton on the Paizo Blog, but to Miguel Regodón Harkness in my printing of Bestiary 5; I believe the former is correct—comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

There are monks and there are monks.  Which means that when they become undead, there are huecuvas and there are kurobozus. 

The split above hinges on your definition of “monk”—whether the monk in your imagination leans in the direction of the Christian (especially the Benedictine) archetype (in game terms, the cleric character class), or toward a more Eastern archetype à la India’s fakirs or China’s Shaolin monks (and the eponymous monk character class, obviously.)

Obviously, there’s a natural West vs. East split there.  But let’s imagine your game is cosmopolitan enough that both kinds of monks share similar faiths/heritages/backgrounds and monastic communities.  Then the question in cases of undeath is: How did they fail (and/or who failed them)?  If they died after having blasphemed, renounced their faith, or with a stain on their soul, then you get a huecuva.  If they died while violating the precepts of their order, if they failed to remain true to their training, or with a stain on their honor, then you get a kurobozu.  In other words, did they falter in faith or practice, in their dedication to the next world or this one?  The answer determines the type of undead.

Beyond that, kurobozu (also known as black monks) are ki, Wisdom, and breath-stealing menaces.  But unlike many undead who arise from misfortune, they have the (18) Wisdom, lawfulness, and presence of mind to engage very long-term schemes of revenge, even going so far as to recruit mortal allies.  The result is a revenant that can be far more effective than the usual angry spectre, wraith, or ghost in laying low the targets of its vengeance.

In Taito, travel is allowed but carefully monitored, and travelers must often stay overnight at tollhouses that double as inns while their papers are approved.  When Brother Laika died at one such tollhouse deep in debt after a drunken bender, the stain on his honor was such that he returned as a black monk.  Now kurobozu Laika visits inns across Taito in the guise of a thirsty, hooded farmer.  His preys on mendicant priests and serious debtors (those owing more than 50 gp), whose empty pouches and desperation he can smell from a spear’s throw away.

A powerful spell has put the citizens of an entire town to sleep.  What begins as a mystery for a party of adventurers becomes a race against time, as they discover a secret society of ghasts and kurobozus are unaffected by the spell and now brazenly feed on the somnolent citizens.

Adventurers arrive at a monastery just ahead of a brutal snowstorm only to find themselves trapped in a schismatic conflict.  One faction wants to continue to study in peace; the other, full of younger hotheads, believes in testing themselves through battle while demanding increased tribute from the surrounding villages.  A guard of kurobozus is responsible for much of the upheaval, having spent months visiting the leader of the violent faction in secret.  Now that the blizzard has arrived, it is a war of barricades and hallway-by-hallway battles, monk versus monk and monk versus undead, with the adventuring party caught in the middle.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 153

For more on kurobozus—as well as some really neat info on travel restrictions during the Edo period—read on here.

If you’re looking for the koto-furunishi, it’s back here.

Twenty years ago this February—sadly I can’t tell you the exact date, as I wasn’t smart enough to tape my shows or keep good records back then—my friend George and I trudged through the snow at 2:30 AM for our very first FM radio show.  Twenty years later, I’m still DJing every week and loving every minute of it.  So last night I threw myself an anniversary party to celebrate, and we partied like it was 1997 all over again. 

Stream/download the fun here till Monday, 03/06/17, at midnight.

Grim Reaper

(Illustration by Wayne Reynolds comes from the Paizo website and is © Paizo Publishing.)

Death has gotten pretty complicated in Pathfinder.  You’ve got psychopomps who want to shepherd souls to their just reward, sahkils who want to terrorize them, night hags who want to bottle and sell them, daemons who want to destroy souls entirely, shinigamis and inevitables who will take you out if you try to defy death (except the shinigamis who take bribes or go rogue)…look, it’s a mess.

And now we have grim reapers and lesser deaths to deal with, which is where I give up and hurl my Bestiaries into the air.  (And then duck, because five of those things are heavy and pointy.)

Except.  Except.  Hang on…I played 52-Book Pickup too soon.  It turns out those books are going to be useful after all.

Every threat we mentioned in the first paragraph above is an outsider.  They’re interested in souls.  Grim reapers and the lesser deaths are undead.  Their interest lies in death itself—the noun and the verb.  It’s a subtle distinction, but a significant one (one that puts them closer to nightshades than shinigamis, cosmologically speaking).  They are interested in the act of dying and the moment of death, not how the spirit is apportioned.  In fact, grim reapers are pretty much death itself given form—kind of like the purple-robed lady Thanos is always trying to get with in the Marvel comics, only more scythe-y.  To put it another way, while a shinigami is the farmhand busy harvesting his soul crop, the grim reaper finds satisfaction in simply cutting the grass.  When what you want is a well-mowed lawn devoid of life, wheat and chaff are all one.

By and large, all the nuance above is the kind of thing that matters to certain GMs a lot, and not at all to everyone else.  But on balance I think it’s good to know, because you never know what players will try to pull at the table.  At the very least, when the PCs try to challenge one of Bestiary 5’s grim reapers to a game of checkers, you can confidently say he isn’t that kind of death and roll for initiative.

Other tidbits: 1) Both grim reapers and lesser deaths (originally called minor reapers) have gotten a CR boost and I presume some stat changes since they were introduced in Pathfinder Adventure Path #48: Shadows of Gallowspire.  2) There may be just one Grim Reaper…or there might be nine (which, if you’ve been craving Nazgûl in your Pathfinder game, should have jumped out at you like a neon shark).  3) Grim reapers sometimes ride dragons, yet one more sign (along with, for instance, their elemental subtypes) that dragons are something more than just monsters and are tied up in the fabric of the world somehow.  4) Lesser deaths are associated with the deck of many things.  Who knows what other ephemera they might be bound into?  And if you can capture lesser deaths, could you capture lesser lives?  Births?  Menarches?  Fears?  Angers?  Joys?

Okay, on to the adventure seeds:

When St. Tomin’s Cathedral was erected upon Argyle Mound, the builders couldn’t eliminate the famous faerie gate there…but they could bar it.  Four stained glass windows representing the four seasons mark the ambulatory behind the chancel.  The figures that represent Winter, Spring, and Summer are trapped fey who block the way between the worlds.  The figure representing Autumn is a bound lesser death who manifests if anyone tries to tamper with the other three windows.

Adventurers must speak with a wyrm of ancient power and might.  Their timing, unfortunately, is abysmal.  The ancient dragon has just begun five centuries of service to a grim reaper.  Addressing the steed without insulting the deadly master will be difficult, especially when the wyrm has no desire to speak with them in the first place.

To save Death, you have to kill it. A cabal of daemons seeks to unseat Lady Death and tear down the ordered bureaucracy that guides souls to their proper rest.  Their plot partially succeeds, temporarily rendering the Final Judge mortal (albeit still mythic and mighty).  But the hint of a vacancy in the office allows the daemons’ co-conspirator, the god of murder, to call up a long dormant aspect of death, the Grim Reaper.  Now adventurers must leap to the defense of the Obsidian Alcazar, leading psychopomps to battle and preventing the scythe-wielding Grim Reaper from stalking and gruesomely murdering Lady Death in her own palace.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #48 86–87 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 134–135

Speaking of magical beings and magical decks of cards, thanks to everyone who’s been engaging with my Campaign in a Bottle series.  Want to get caught up?  Click here.

Also: “Shut up!  Shut up, you American.”

Oh, and no radio show this week, so no link.

Gravebound

Many bogeymen exist and persist because they illustrate a certain theme or fear.  The wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance, is a symbol of Stranger Danger to the young, and a smooth-talking stealer of virginity for the not-so-young.  He looms large because he’s a potential villain in our lives as well as Little Red’s.

For a long time, one of the main things vampires represented was the fear of being buried alive (and/or the fear of accidentally burying a loved one too early).  It’s all there in the early folktales: the grave dirt under the claw-like nails; the gaunt, hungry features; the thirst for blood, particularly the blood of those the victim knew in life; and so on.

But as vampire legends became codified and romanticized around the Dracula and Lestat models, they’ve become symbols of other things: fear of death, the lure of immortality, the horror of sexually transmitted diseases (attention, post-AZT kids: AIDS was a nightmare and you need to learn your queerstory), eternal love, and so on.  In the process, dirty fears of the grave fell away.  When your pop culture portrays every vampire having Spike’s looks and Christian Grey’s bank account, the fear of having to smash open your casket and then dig through six feet of earth just doesn’t compute.  Meanwhile, other candidates for the theme are also too burdened with cultural weight of their own: Zombies stand for pandemics and the breakdown of the system, while ghouls are much more about fears of grave robbing and cannibalism.

All of which is a very long-winded way of saying that we needed an undead to fill the thematic void left by vampires—and the gravebound is a perfect candidate.  Not only is it obsessed with its own unfair death, but it’s got some nasty mechanics to inflict that death on others.  It can make a pit appear under a victim as a standard action, and then fill the pit up with grave dirt the following round as a full-round action.  Even if a gravebound’s victim escape its clutches on the initial encounter, he could well contract a disease that sends him into a coma almost indistinguishable from death…dooming him to an unfair live burial despite his best efforts.

Whoever created this monster also gets points for a nice bit of flavor as well: the gravebound’s dirt body has a shovel sticking out of its back.  Not only does this detail feel very true to folklore—I can especially envision such a detail appearing in a Japanese ghost story—but it gives PCs who vanquish the gravebound some in-the-nick-of-time assistance in recovering their buried comrades.  All in all, this is an excellent monster and a great example of how to make a new creature feel as authentic as one from folklore with just a little attention to detail.

After losing his gold to a devious country parson, a leprechaun became consumed with hatred for humanity.  Most leprechauns who give in to such feelings murder the objects of their ire and become redcaps, but this particular fey went unrevenged when the parson died unexpectedly.  The leprechaun still lurks in the graveyard by the parsonage—he has knocked over the cleric’s headstone so often the burial society has stopped resituating it—so he was first on the scene when a premature burial caused a gravebound to rise from the earth.  The leprechaun now has a new revenge plan: lure as many people as he can to the graveyard and then aid the gravebound in sending them to an untimely rest.

A doge protected the location of his treasure vault in the most efficient way possible: He buried alive everyone who worked on it.  When the workers arose as gravebound spirits, the callous doge was unconcerned, as he could dimension door into the next chamber past the atrocity.  His son, however, does not have such magical talents.  Having taken his father’s place, he hires adventurers to open the vault so that he can claims his legacy.  (Of course he pleads ignorance when the gravebound manifest.)  He also fails to tell them—because he does not know—that his father survived the assassination attempt and secretly plans to retaliate against his son and all his allies.

A kami asks a party of adventurers for aid.  A gravebound has arisen in his ward, and he lacks the power to dispatch the creature by himself.  If they aid the kami and slay the gravebound, he rewards them with an old prayer scroll that hides a secret on its reverse side.  However, doing so complicates their social lives and possibly their honor.  First, a rival of theirs spots them with the gravebound’s shovel and spreads rumors that they are doing menial labor below their station; second, the kami’s ward is devoted to the Turtle God, whose worship is despised by the current regime.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 128

Looking for the goliath frog?  We covered that a few days ago.

Get ready for Halloween with this week’s radio show!  New music, a Phantogram spotlight, and close to an hour of songs about ghosts and hauntings for you spook fans.  Stream/download it here till Monday, October 31, at midnight.

Fext

(Illustration by Ertaç Altınöz comes from the artist’s DeviantArt page and is © Paizo Publishing.)

At first I wasn’t going to do this monster, assuming it was a setting-neutral reskin of the Inner Sea Bestiary’s Spellscar fext.  But a closer look at the stats reveals the adjective-less fext is a horror all its own.

The notion of the unkillable officer or warlord is a pretty common one in fantasy—especially in novels, where a villain’s reputation can grow over the course of a whole book or even a series.*  So the fext nicely fills that thematic slot.  It’s also nice to have a lich-like undead option for martial types that’s not your standard graveknight.  (That’s a death knight to you 3.5 fans).

The fext is also one of those cases where it’s worth going back to the original Pathfinder Adventure Path entry (#71: Rasputin Must Die!).  It lays out a wicked ecology (necrology?) for how fexts are created, where children are corrupted in the womb and then raised to be great soldiers, ignorant (or not, depending on the process and local custom) of the premature undeath that awaits them.  Eventually, they surrender to fever, lying comatose until they rise as undead horrors, ready to resume their true destinies.  For some this transformation is a revelation, for others a shock that gives way to resignation…but for many of these grim butchers, their lives were already so blood-soaked that the metamorphosis is merely an interruption in a long parade of death.

Which raises the question, where do these creatures come from?  What sick individual or society would create them, given the time it takes to bring a single fext into being? The answers are many, but all of a piece: constantly war-torn countries, military dictatorships, occupied territories, sites of ethnic cleansing, families where honor and revenge trump morals and ethics, and so on.  Where are fexts created?  Wherever hate lasts for generations.

Tales of redoubtable, merry freedom fighters are usually exaggerations.  Most rebels nurse far darker thoughts of revenge, score-settling, and bloody redemption.  As adventurers with the Lady Light Crusade fight street-to-street in the spell-blasted district of Barshaw, trying to herd frightened citizens to Highgarten before rising floodwaters trap them, they find their way blocked by a platoon wearing uniforms from the last war, led by a grinning fext.

A surprising number of fexts were elves in life.  Already given to racial and class-related schisms, and with centuries to nurse their grudges, disgruntled elven houses will go to dire lengths to restore their honor and settle old scores.  Fexts also explain the reputations of certain dark elf generals as unkillable nightmares.  Drow matrons are quite happy to contribute a male child to their houses’ military aims, but more than one of these future fexts has grown to overthrow his mother after his apotheosis.

Rebel adventurers live double lives in a twin cities.  One is a desert city-state ruled by cruel philosopher-kings, the other a conifer-filled alpine temple complex where druids and skinwalkers walk with—and as—animals, espousing survival of the fittest.  The adventurers dance between the two via gates made of shadow, trying to improve the lives of commoners in both locations while uncovering what mystery binds these cities together.  One clue might be the cities’ respective rulers, who laugh at the bite of steel or claw.

—Pathfinder Adventure Path #71 88–89 & Pathfinder Bestiary 5 115

*Novels also leave a lot of time for the characters to fret over said unkillability, which is key to building the tension.  I mentioned before that I’m listening to An Ember in the Ashes on audiobook, and 3/4s of the way in the Commandant is still positively terrifying. 

(On the other hand, fantasy films have to be more economical with their time.  That means they usually put the murderous McGuffin in the path of the protagonists early on, making the central tension not if the warlord can be killed but if in time.)

Tuesday night, in addition to the usual indie rock and pop, we took a deep dive into Paul Simon’s latest album, Stranger to Stranger, which is chock-full of microtonal thinking and world music influences.  I had a lot of fun with this one and I hope you do to.  Stream or download it here until Monday, August 22, at midnight.